How Like an Angel

by Margaret Millar

  His fingers curled around the money in his pocket. A hun­dred and twenty dollars plus the three hundred Tom Jurgensen owed him made four hundred and twenty. If he went back to Reno and played carefully, if his luck was good—

  “Where do you want to get off at?” Brother Crown said. “I’m going to Sears myself.”

  “Sears will be fine.”

  “You got a friend in town?”

  “I had one. Maybe I’ve still got him.”

  Brother Crown pulled into the parking lot behind Sears and braked the truck to a noisy stop. “Here you are, safe and sound, like I promised Sister Blessing. You and the Sister ever meet before?”

  “No.”

  “She don’t always make such a how-de-do over strangers.”

  “Maybe I remind her of somebody.”

  “You don’t remind me of nobody.” Brother Crown climbed down from the truck and started shuffling across the parking lot toward the back door of Sears.

  “Thanks for the ride, Brother,” Quinn called out after him.

  “Amen.”

  It was nine o’clock, eighteen hours since Sister Blessing had welcomed him to the Tower as a stranger and treated him like a friend. He touched the money in his pocket again. He could feel its strings pulling at him and he wished he hadn’t taken it. He thought of running after Brother Crown and giving it to him to return to Sister Blessing. Then he remembered that the possession of private money was not allowed at the Tower and handing it over now to Brother Crown would get Sister Bless­ing into trouble, perhaps of a very serious kind.

  He turned and began walking quickly toward State Street.

  Tom Jurgensen sold boats and marine insurance down at the foot of the breakwater. He had a tiny office whose win­dows were plastered with For Sale signs and pictures of yawls and sloops and ketches and cutters and schooners, most of them under sail.

  When Quinn entered, Jurgensen was smoking a cigar and talking into the telephone which perched affectionately on his shoulder the way Brother Tongue’s little bird had perched on his. “Sails by Rattsey, so what. The thing’s a tub. I’m not bidding.”

  He put the phone down and leaned over the desk to shake Quinn’s hand. “Well, Joe Quinn himself in person. How’s the old boy?”

  “Older. Also broke.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that, Joe. Business has been lousy. This isn’t a rich man’s town any more. The penny-pinching middle class has moved in and they don’t care about teakwood or mahogany, all they want—” Jurgensen broke off with a sigh. “You’re absolutely flat?”

  “Except for a little money that belongs to someone else.”

  “Since when did you ever let that worry you, Joe? I’m being funny, of course, ha ha.”

  “Ha ha, sure you are,” Quinn said. “I’ve got your I.O.U. for three hundred dollars. I want the money now.”

  “I don’t have it. This is damned embarrassing, old boy, but I just don’t have it. If you’d settle for a boat, I’ve got a nice little sea mew, 300-pound keel, Watts sails, gaff rig—”

  “Just what I need to get around Venice. Only I’m not going to Venice.”

  “Keep your shirt on, it was just a suggestion. I suppose you already have a car?”

  “Bad supposing, Tom.”

  “Well, there’s this crate—this dandy little’ 54 Ford Victoria my wife’s been driving. She’ll put up a terrible squawk if I take it away from her but what can I do? It’s worth at least three hundred. Two-tone blue and cream, white-walls, heater, radio.”

  “I could do better than that on a’ 54 Ford in Reno.”

  “You’re not in Reno like you’re not in Venice,” Jurgensen said. “It’s the best I can do for you right now. Either take the car in full payment or use it until I can scrape up your money. It will suit me better if you just borrow it. That way Helen will be a little easier to handle.”

  “It’s a deal. Where’s the car?”

  “Parked in the garage behind my house, 631 Gaviota Road. It hasn’t been used for a week—Helen’s visiting her mother in Denver—so you might have a little trouble starting it. Here are the keys. You going to be in town for a while, Joe?”

  “In and out, I expect.”

  “Call me in a couple of weeks. I may have your money then. And take care of the crate or Helen will accuse me of losing it in a poker game. She may anyway, but—” Jurgensen spread his hands and shrugged. “You’re looking pretty good, Joe.”

  “Early to bed and early to rise puts color in the cheeks and sparkle in the eyes. Like they say.”

  “Like who says?”

  “The Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven.”

  Jurgensen raised his eyebrows. “You taken up religion or something?”

  “Something,” Quinn said. “Thanks for the car and I’ll see you later.”

  Quinn had no trouble starting the car. He drove to a gas station, filled up the tank, added a quart of oil and parted with the first of Sister Blessing’s twenty-dollar bills.

  He asked the attendant the best way to get to Chicote.

  “If it was me now, I’d follow 101 to Ventura, then cut over to 99. It’s longer that way but you don’t get stuck on 150, which hasn’t half a mile of straightaway from one end to the other. You save trading stamps, sir?”

  “I guess I could start.”

  As soon as he turned inland, at Ventura, he began to regret not waiting until night to make the trip. The bare hills, alter­nating with lemon and walnut groves, shimmered in the relent­less sun, and the air was so dry that the cigarettes he’d bought in San Felice snapped in two in his fingers. He tried to cool off by thinking of San Felice, the breeze from the ocean and the harbor dotted with sails, but the contrast only made him more uncomfortable and he stopped thinking entirely for a while, surrendering himself to the heat.

  He reached Chicote at noon. Since his last visit the small city had changed, grown bigger but not up and certainly not better. Fringed by oil wells and inhabited by the people who lived off them, it lay flat and brown and hard like something a cook had forgotten to take out of the oven. Underprivileged trees grew stunted along streets dividing new housing tracts from old slums. Small children played in the dust and weeds of vacant lots, looking just as contented as the children playing in the clean white sand of the San Felice beaches. It was in the teen-agers that Quinn saw the uneasiness caused by a too quick and easy prosperity. They cruised aimlessly up and down the streets in brand new convertibles and ranch wagons. They stopped only at drive-in movies and drive-in malt shops and restaurants, keeping to their cars the way soldiers in enemy territory kept to their tanks.

  Quinn bought what he needed at a drugstore and checked in at a motel near the center of town. Then he ate lunch in an air-conditioned café that was so cold he had to turn up the collar of his tweed jacket while he ate.

  When he had finished he went to the phone booth at the rear of the café. Patrick O’Gorman was listed in the directory as living at 702 Olive Street.

  So that’s all there is to it, Quinn thought with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment. O’Gorman’s still in Chicote and I’ve made a quick hundred and twenty dollars. I’ll drive back to the Tower in the morning, give Sister Blessing the informa­tion, and then head for Reno.

  It seemed very simple, and yet the simplicity of it worried Quinn. If this was all there was to it, why had Sister Blessing played it so close to the chest? Why hadn’t she just asked Brother Crown to call O’Gorman from San Felice or look up his address in the out-of-town phone books stocked both by the public library and the main telephone office? Quinn couldn’t believe that she hadn’t thought of both these possibil­ities. She was, in her own words and by Quinn’s own obser­vation, no fool. Yet she had paid a hundred and twenty dollars for information she could have got from a two-dollar
phone call.

  He put a dime in the slot and dialed O’Gorman’s number.

  A girl answered, breathlessly, as if she had raced somebody else to the phone. “This is the O’Gorman residence.”

  “Is Mr. O’Gorman there, please?”

  “Richard’s not a mister,” the girl said with a giggle. “He’s only twelve.”

  “I meant your father.”

  “My fath—? Just a minute.”

  There was a scurry at the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice, stilted and self-conscious: “To whom did you wish to speak?”

  “Mr. Patrick O’Gorman.”

  “I’m sorry, he’s not—not here.”

  “When do you expect him back?”

  “I don’t expect him back at all.”

  “Perhaps you could tell me where I can reach him?”

  “Mr. O’Gorman died five years ago,” the woman said and hung up.

  THREE

  Olive Street was in a section of town that was beginning to show its age but still trying to preserve appearances. Seven-o-two was flanked by patches of well-kept lawn. In the middle of one a white oleander bloomed, and in the middle of the other stood an orange tree bearing both fruit and blossoms at the same time. A boy’s bicycle leaned carelessly against the tree as if its owner had suddenly found something more interesting to do. The windows of the small stucco house were closed and the blinds drawn. Someone had recently hosed off the sidewalk and the porch. Little puddles steamed in the sun and disappeared even as Quinn watched.

  The front door had an old-fashioned lion’s-head knocker made of brass, newly polished. Reflected in it Quinn could see a tiny crooked reflection of himself. In a way it matched his own self-image.

  The woman who answered the door was, like the house, small and neat and no longer young. Although her features were pretty and her figure still good, her face lacked any spark of interest or animation. It was as if, at some time during her life, she had stepped outside and had never been able to find her way back in.

  Quinn said, “Mrs. O’Gorman?”

  “Yes. But I’m not buying anything.”

  She’s not selling either, Quinn thought. “I’m Joe Quinn. I used to know your husband.”

  She didn’t exactly unbend but she seemed faintly interested. “That was you on the telephone?”

  “Yes. It was kind of a shock to me, suddenly hearing that he was dead. I came by to offer my condolences and apologize if my call upset you in any way.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry I hung up so abruptly. I wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not, or a piece of malice, having some­one ask for Patrick after all these years. Everyone in Chicote knows that Patrick’s gone.”

  Gone. Quinn registered the word and her hesitation before saying it.

  “Where did you know my husband, Mr. Quinn?”

  There was no safe reply to this but Quinn picked one he considered fairly safe. “Pat and I were in the service to­gether.”

  “Oh. Well, come inside. I was just making some lemonade to have ready for the children when they get home.”

  The front room was small and seemed smaller because of the wallpaper and carpeting. Mrs. O’Gorman’s taste—or per­haps O’Gorman’s—ran to roses, large red ones in the carpet, pink and white ones in the wallpaper. An air-conditioner, fitted into the side window, was whirring noisily but without much effect. The room was still hot.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Quinn.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now tell me about my husband.”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “But that isn’t how it’s done, is it?” Mrs. O’Gorman said. “When a man comes to offer condolences to the widow of his old war buddy, reminiscences are usually called for, aren’t they? So please start reminiscing. You have my undivided attention.”

  Quinn sat in an uneasy silence.

  “Perhaps you’re the shy kind, Mr. Quinn, who needs a little help getting started. How about, ‘I’ll never forget the time that—’? Or you might prefer a more dramatic approach. For instance, the Germans were coming over the hill in swarms and you lay trapped inside your wrecked tank, injured, with only your good buddy Pat O’Gorman to look after you. You like that?”

  Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, I never saw any Germans. Koreans, yes.”

  “All right, switch locales. The scene changes to Korea. There’s not much sense in wasting that hill and the wrecked tank—”

  “What’s on your mind, Mrs. O’Gorman?”

  “What’s on yours?” she said with a small steely smile. “My husband was not in the service, and he never allowed any­one to call him Pat. So suppose you start all over, taking some­what less liberty with the truth.”

  “There isn’t any truth in this case, or very little. I never met your husband. I didn’t know he was dead. In fact, all I knew was his name and the fact that he lived here in Chicote at one time.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “That’s a good question,” Quinn said, “I wish I could think of an equally good answer. The truth just isn’t plausible.”

  “The listener is supposed to be the judge of plausibility. I’m listening.”

  Quinn did some fast thinking. He had already disobeyed Sister Blessing’s orders not to try and contact O’Gorman. To bring her name into it now would serve no purpose. And ten chances to one Mrs. O’Gorman wouldn’t believe a word of it anyway, since the Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven didn’t make for a very convincing story. There was one possible way out: if O’Gorman’s death had taken place under peculiar circumstances (and Quinn remembered the way Mrs. O’Gorman had hesitated over the word “gone”) she might want to talk about it. And if she did the talking, he wouldn’t have to.

  He said, “The fact is, I’m a detective, Mrs. O’Gorman.”

  Her reaction was quicker and more intense than he had anticipated. “So they’re going to start in all over again, are they? I get a year or two of peace, I reach the point where I can walk down the street without people staring at me, feeling sorry for me, whispering about me. Now things will be right back where they were in the first place, newspaper headlines, silly men asking silly questions. My husband died by accident, can’t they get that through their thick skulls? He was not murdered, he did not commit suicide, he did not run away to begin a new life with a new identity. He was a devout and devoted man and I will not have his memory tarnished any further. As for you, I suggest you stick to tagging parked cars and picking up kids with expired bicycle licenses. There’s a bicycle in the front yard you can start with, it hasn’t had a license for two years. Now get out of here and don’t come back.”

  Mrs. O’Gorman wasn’t a woman either to argue with or to try and charm. She was intelligent, forceful and embittered, and the combination was too much for Quinn. He left quickly and quietly.

  Driving back to Main Street, he attempted to convince him­self that his job was done except for the final step of reporting to Sister Blessing. O’Gorman had died by accident, his wife claimed. But what kind of accident? If the police had once suspected voluntary disappearance, it meant the body had never been found.

  “My work is over,” he said aloud. “The whys and wheres and hows of O’Gorman’s death are none of my business. After five years the trail’s cold anyway. On to Reno.”

  Thinking of Reno didn’t help erase O’Gorman from his mind. Part of Quinn’s job at the club, often a large part, was to be on the alert for men and women wanted by the police in other states and countries. Photographs, descriptions and Wanted circulars arrived daily and were posted for the security officers to study. A great many arrests were made quietly and quickly without interfering with a single spin of the roulette wheels. Quinn had once been told that more people wanted by the police were picked up in R
eno and Las Vegas than in any other places in the country. The two cities were magnets for bank robbers and embezzlers, conmen and gangsters, any crook with a bank roll and a double-or-nothing urge.

  Quinn parked his car in front of a cigar store and went in to buy a newspaper. The rack contained a variety, three from Los Angeles, two from San Francisco, a San Felice Daily Press, a Wall Street Journal, and a local weekly, The Chicote Beacon. Quinn bought a Beacon and turned to the editorial page. The paper was published on Eighth Avenue, and the publisher and editor was a man named John Harrison Ronda.

  Ronda’s office was a cubicle surrounded by six-foot walls, the bottom-half wood paneling, the top-half plate glass. Stand­ing, Ronda could see his whole staff, seated at his desk he could blot them all out. It was a convenient arrangement.

  He was a tall, pleasant-faced, unhurried man in his fifties, with a deep resonant voice. “What can I do for you, Quinn?”

  “I’ve just been talking to Patrick O’Gorman’s wife. Or shall we say, widow?”

  “Widow.”

  “Were you in Chicote when O’Gorman died?”

  “Yes. Matter of fact I’d just used my last dime to buy this paper. It was in the red at the time and might still be there if the O’Gorman business hadn’t occurred. I had two big breaks within a month. First O’Gorman, and then three or four weeks later one of the local bank tellers, a nice little lady—why are some of the worst embezzlers such nice little ladies?—was caught with her fingers in the till. All ten of them. The Beacon’s circulation doubled within a year. Yes, I owe a lot to O’Gorman and I don’t mind admitting it. He was the ill wind that blew the wolf away from my door. So you’re a friend of his widow’s, are you?”